Maurizio Lazzarato: a deafening noise

Translated by Arianna Bove and Dan Skinner for generation-online. In French on Multitudes, originally published in Futur Antérieur 23, 1994/3-4

"The speed of development of
techniques contributes to erase the borders between activity and
formation".

In the analysis of this month of struggle, one of
the things which struck me the most was the shift between the richness
of the subjects, the behaviors, the forms of struggle, the political
implications and the poverty of the speeches, the languages, the codes
that the movement (movements) produced on itself, as if it was a
movement without voice, an aphasic movement. That does not mean that
the movements did not produce and showed lived experiences, languages
and behaviors (namely their contents and their form): on the contrary
they were structured and consolidated. Neither does this mean that the
movements did not know how to express new resistances to new relations
of power: on the contrary they showed them.

What I want to say is that the movements did not
produce any form of struggle, organization, nor speech or form of
subjectivation that was immediately functional to the struggle and its
objectives. This flexibility, this plasticity and this reversibility of
the forms of subjectivation surely constituted the most extraordinary
force of this movement, but perhaps also its weakness. In any event,
while operating in such a way, the movements showed a total and hostile
separation in relation to politics and its mediations. In this conflict
everything has been "regulated" without discussion, without mediation
or negotiation, as if the fight were supported by two completely
different logics.

To advance a hypothesis on this subject, we might
say that the movement (and by movement I do not mean its sociological
existence, but its manifestation as event) tested and sought a
"knowledge" adequate to new relations of power. Where, by knowledge, we
mean the practical devices of visibility and enunciation, an ensemble
of agencements and discursive practices which constitute and allow its
"subjectivation". The movement, lacking the possibility - under the
given conditions - to change the codes of communication and regimes of
opinions (which are codes and opinions of "representation”), has not
expressed any "general" language and has thus prevented power from
defining it, naming it and bringing it back under the rules of its
action, as it had been able to do in 1986 and with more difficulty in
1990.

The movement disappeared as it had appeared
(revealing for a short time the new forms and conditions of its
existence). What transpired, maybe, was a general épreuve that did not
leave anything in the hands of power and the political system, aside
from a few hundreds arrests (moreover immediately used by the police
force to produce an analysis of the movement). What it has left to the
class movement is more difficult to define. It determined a "threshold"
that any fight will have to cross to constitute itself. What is
certain, on the other hand, it is that for the first time the old
effects of "namings" of multiplicity in political events ("the working
class", "the revolution", "communism") have in a radical and
irreversible way not played any part in the "constitution" of the
movement. Moreover, which is more important, the movements have
completely broken away from the memory of the labour movement (all the
post-68 movements went in this direction, but only this one definitely
broke away from this regime of truth).

The radicalism and novelty of the movement thus lie
in this apparent silence or, more precisely, in the fact that in the
public space occupied by the media the codes and vocabularies with
which the movements were expressed have been those of the opinion:
"student, unemployed, young, suburban" etc. This language lies between
the sociological language and that of the journalists to which power
was obliged and which the movement was reduced to use. Beyond this
politico-mediatic language, the expressions of the movement has refused
all denominations and subtracted itself from game of representation.

This is because the movement experienced
representation as a trap, a machine of constitution of political
subjectivity that was completely foreign to its very anthropology and
from which it is necessary to withdraw in order to open up other spaces
elsewhere. What the political system (including all of the Left) could
not accept is the refusal of "representation" and its codes. We can all
recognize that without any concession this movement sought and
experimented forms of "expression" against representation and apart
from it. On this point also the movement determined a radical rupture,
a point of no return.

The simulacrum of the event

To measure the importance of this "silence" we
should compare it to the discursive and media strategies set in motion
by power in relation to the movement of 1986, when its political
definition was the great socialist operation of the decade. If any
political innovation was introduced by the Socialists, it was in the
forms of control of the class movements. The dispositif of power and
its agencements of enunciation (the media, institutions, etc.) have not
managed to transform the event into a simulacrum; on the other hand,
this strategy worked perfectly with the movement of 1986.

In 1986, a year of high economic growth, the media
and institutional dispositif managed to combine the ideology of
triumphant consumerism with that of human rights and to make them
"live" as a value of the movement, as its fundamental quality, in a
self-assured society that thought it had definitively "expelled" class
struggle from its sight. The crisis of meaning of the great
confrontation of classes (their impotence to name the new power
relations) was resolved by the introduction of the sociological
categories of "integration" and “exclusions”. And the conflict was
reduced to the terrain of a pacified ethics: a "moral generation" which
acted inside the unsurpassable "ethics" of the market, democracy and
human rights.

A re-reading of some of the texts of that time
provokes some astonishment: "the freedom of the consumers - which we
all are – is today defended in the street, if need be – wrote the
director of Liberation, one of the key media of this operation - we
have entered the consumerism of the individual freedoms. Do not touch
my freedoms of choice... Whilst reclaiming in such a collective manner
the declaration the declaration of human rights, the youth of 1986
extremely embarrassed all of the political community: it is in the name
of the democratic consensus that it demanded the withdrawal of the
Devaquet project which it expressed as a generation."[1]

This discourse, managed by the Socialist Party but
especially by the media, found a powerful relay inside the movement in
S.O.S.-Racism, which had thus succeeded in removing the political
direction of the movement to the radical wing represented by the
"second generation" of immigration. The construction of the simulacrum
of the "moral generation" only functioned because there were forces
inside the movement which held onto and managed this discourse. As
always the act of "naming" a movement cannot be left only to the media,
politics or the performative powers of language. Criticisms of the
media are often an alibi for the lack of analysis of the specific
agencement between the social and communication technologies.
Berlusconi docet.

But let us return to the construction of political
leaders as process of subjectivation of the simulacrum. The most
important leaders of S.O.S-Racism expressed themselves in these terms:

"In the past, militants wanted to be hard, erudite
and aggressive. But Leninism is dead. Today’s militants are more human.
And above all they tried to be effective. This was the last of our
concerns: we would only run after myths, in the bad sense of the term,
the revolution, proletarian internationalism, the vanguard party
[exactly the old effects of "denomination" of the political event
n.d.r.]... Our only reference is human rights. Our philosophy is
humanism."

Even though the ideology of human rights in its
consumerist version is still the official ideology today, within the
movements it lasted the time of a fashion. The movement of 1990 had
already deeply cracked it and in 1994 it played no part, having been
completely (depassee) surpassed by what it was to undermine (refouler):
class struggle; a reappearance of class struggle, as I said, but inside
a paradigm which often prevents us to recognize it as such.

The same paper that had defined the ‘86 generation
as an ethical one was forced today to show how the problem of
immigration was not a problem of integration but according to the
language of opinion, one of “rich and poor” (the two eternal categories
power uses to define exploitation). Consumerism, individual liberties,
human rights are effaced by the hard emergence of the class hierarchy
which originates in the '80s. The great launch of the film Germinal,
with the participation of the political class, could signal the coming
to terms of power with the need to revise its ideology of human rights
and adapt it to the issue of labour and poverty.

One of the journalists of Liberation reports the
opinions of the participants in the confrontations of Lyon in these
terms:

"This is a revolt, a social explosion: there are
too many poor. I live on 1800 FR. per month, others on 180000."

"My mother buys (gagne) Smic. In all these stores
there is nothing for less than 2000 FR. I saw a sweater for 9000 balls.
It is like gold which they wave in front of your eyes and you do not
have the right to touch. It is for that reason that Lyon explodes:
because the contrast between the very rich center and the suburbs is
too strong.

"You see, the cops - says Ahmed - I aim to the
knees, that hurts more."
Question: "Do you aim at the cops?"
Answer: "No, at the rich!"

The reemergence of the issue of wages (social,
objectively social because posed by the subjects "out" production
sociale, objectivement sociale car posée par des sujets "hors"
production) completely blocked the mechanism of the simulacrum. In the
same way the process of the creation of leaders, largely used in '86,
was stopped, as the creation of a process of subjectivation that was
not built by traditional political channels, but rather by the media.
In fact the leaders of the movement had become small stars of the small
screen, like sport, music or journalism celebs. We must also point out
that in 1986 the focusing of the media on Isabelle Thomas as spokesman
of the movement had already caused its "dismissal" of the
representative instances of the movement.

On the contrary in 1994 the movement was an
"anonymous" movement in the true meaning of the term. One month of
struggle produced neither a form of organization separate from the
struggle, nor leaders. Without "delegates", the machine of the
representation could not mark the body of the movements with its
languages of power. The media thus "received" the new contents of the
movement which were simply recorded, without the power "to transfigure
them" in the political language of representation and without being
able to determine the chain of command inside the movement. The
movement simply managed this situation without introducing any
"symbolic rupture". For this reason we can say that the movement, when
expressed in the public space, used the same codes of expression as
power. In the public space controlled by the machines of communication,
we can only speak their aseptic and empty language (and thus withdraw
from dialogue and communication), unless we want to offer points of
anchoring for media techniques.

But does this situation deny the need for a
symbolic rupture, for the creation of language in the event?

Thus the violent emergence of class conflict (in
discourse and actions) has prevented all possibilities to turn the
event into a simulacrum because power lacked the ideological weapons
and the chance of “infiltrating" the movements. The most important
effort of definition was made by the police force, but all the
fragments of institutional discourse never succeeded in building the
"truth" of the simulacrum.

The radical separation of the movement from the
political system (State, parties, trade unions) is perhaps its most
important aspect, because it proves the definitive crisis of political
mediation in the form it had been conceived in the post-war period.
This is also the first true post-Communist class movement. French and
European politicians in particular tried to exorcise Berlusconi and at
the same time were fascinated by his victory, because they confusedly
perceived that in Italy power managed to find a new agencement between
democracy and enterprise. But the fact that this agencement is
organized by communication is also what, at the moment, destabilizes
them, so used are they to relate to society through labour.

Only class movements such as the "French March"
will be able to carry out what Berlusconi "mystified": the expression
of new forms of cooperation and power outside and against
representation, outside and against the Berlusconian strategy to
integrate new forms of expression into representation.

The social wage

Whilst this movement objectively put at the center
of this dynamics the problem of the social wage, it also posed the
problem of its articulation. The definition of the wage as social wages
is not simply an extension of its distribution, but also and at the
same time a modification of its form.

For the first time the struggles of March showed a
"non-productive'’ subject that fights for a wage issue. This apparent
contradiction is easily explained when we think of wages as having
bench marks of space-time co-ordinates completely different from those
of work. Indeed these new "wage" struggles refer to a block of
space-time that has nothing to do with that of the factory, work or the
trade union. For this reason these movements are of capital importance
to define class struggle in post modernity. The fact that no analyses
or reflection is dedicated to this aspect of the forms of
subjectivation, rather than attesting to a weakness of the movement,
only points to the inability (impuissance) of the left to think in
terms of the new conditions of accumulation.

Thus whilst we should think about the social wage,
we should not start from the wage of productive labour as it is
traditionally defined and take it as measure and ground for
distribution. We should do the opposite.

In any case, it is necessary to raise new
questions. How can the social wage, for example, be a response to the
new temporal and spatial forms of the productive co-operation and of
exploitation? How can the social wages reverse the forms of
exploitation in communication - control of time - and those which are
constituted in the territory - control of space?

It seems to me that the movement, through the
practical criticism of the media and through the self-organization of
the youths of the suburbs, has defined the premises of a deeper
reflection on the theme of the social wage.

Access to new communication technologies will
become (but it is today already in a way more important than one
imagines) a source of discrimination, of hierarchisation and of
exploitation that will not have anything to envy to the factory and
that, as we have seen with Berlusconi, was only a first taste of the
new structuring of exploitation. Collective equipments of new
technology, opened communication networks and social data banks must
form part of the definition of the social wage, since today 2/3 of the
data that circulate in IT networks concern the economy and finance.

If the control aspect of "technologies of today"
were not present as such in the movements (it has been so indirectly
through the strategy adopted towards the media), the problem of
dispositif of control of space was abruptly introduced by the young
people of the suburbs.

A senior civil servant of the State said to Le
Monde: "I hardly appreciate this word of exclusion". It is an easiness
of language that masks a difficulty of analysis... The population of
foreign origin, for example, shows in many respects to be perfectly
“included” ... Rather than analysing “exclusion", it is thus necessary
to reflect upon the social conflicts which develop around the city. The
fact that "mauvais lieux" in our society are designated is undoubtedly
the essential form given to the conflict between the rich and the poor
today. The use of space is the stake object much stronger than here are
twenty years. In the same way as we say that a company "externalizes" a
fraction of its costs when resorting to subcontracting, we could ask
whether a company has not thus also “externalized" its conflicts... It
would be wrong to underestimate these conflicts which take the city as,
today, a major place of expression."

These new devices of power (no longer of
disciplinarisation in "closed" spaces like the factory, but of
"control" in open spaces) require forms of resistance and strategies of
struggle which must be integrated in the discourse of the social wage.
The same senior civil servant of the State allows us to draw up a
direct relationship between wages and space.

"One of the aspects of poverty is what I name
"relegation ", i.e. the fact of seeing oneself denied the right to live
in a place that is not an "mauvais lieu". There is a sector of the
population who cannot strictly leave the districts known as
"difficult"... On the contrary, in the same way that there exists a
SMIC[2], there is a "minimal mobility" to reclaim."

To imagine a strategy on these forms of temporal
and spatial mobility would be surely an instrument to remove the
initiative from the capitalists, even on the terrain of "labour". The
social wage must thus include sets of issues such as those, for
example, concerning access to communication networks and "minimal
mobility". It is only on these conditions that the social wage can
correspond to new relations of power which structure our society.

1. (Tr.
Note: the Devaquet project was the proposed reform to the higher
education system which restricted open access to university. The bill
was heavily opposed and never went through. For more on the struggles
of 1986 see: http://www.noborder.org/strasbourg/)